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The treewidth is a structural parameter that measures the tree-likeness of a graph. Many algorithmic and combinatorial results are expressed in terms of the treewidth. In this paper, we study the treewidth of outer k-planar graphs, that is, graphs that admit a straight-line drawing where all the vertices lie on a circle, and every edge is crossed by at most k other edges. Wood and Telle [New York J. Math., 2007] showed that every outer k-planar graph has treewidth at most 3k + 11 using so-called planar decompositions, and later, Auer et al. [Algorithmica, 2016] proved that the treewidth of outer 1-planar graphs is at most 3, which is tight. In this paper, we improve the general upper bound to 1.5k + 2 and give a tight bound of 4 for k = 2. We also establish a lower bound: we show that, for every even k, there is an outer k-planar graph with treewidth k+2. Our new bound immediately implies a better bound on the cop number, which answers an open question of Durocher et al. [GD 2023] in the affirmative. Our treewidth bound relies on a new and simple triangulation method for outer k-planar graphs that yields few crossings with graph edges per edge of the triangulation. Our method also enables us to obtain a tight upper bound of k + 2 for the separation number of outer k-planar graphs, improving an upper bound of 2k + 3 by Chaplick et al. [GD 2017]. We also consider outer min-k-planar graphs, a generalization of outer k-planar graphs, where we achieve smaller improvements.